Food Choices for Healthy People and a Healthy Planet

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Organic is not more expensive than conventional food!

In Food Politics, Food to Avoid, Food to Try,
  • Posted on August 23, 2012
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Organic is not more expensive than other food — if you factor in the cost of environmental damage caused by conventional industrial agriculture. Pesticides, herbicides, and the waste from billions of farmed animals foul our air, soil, and waterways. Here are some interesting figures about the true cost of food.

A box of breakfast cereal may sell for $3.50, but its environmental impacts (from air and water pollution, greenhouse gases, waste, etc.) make the true cost $4.05, according to the watchdog trucost.com. You may pay $3.00 a liter for fruit juice, but it really costs $3.19. The most shocking statistic I saw on this site was for cheese. A 12-ounce hunk of cheese that sets you back $6.50 at the cashier should really cost $7.68.

What about beef? We’ve known for a while that livestock (animals grown for food) produce as much greenhouse gases as all forms of transportation put together. The Center for Investigative Reporting has just released a report on hamburgers, which contains some startling statistics. Did you know that we eat over 40 billion burgers a year? That we use about 8 times as much land to grow food and pasture for animals, as we do to grow food directly for humans? That a quarter-pound of beef took 450 gallons of water to produce? That cows in the U.S. produce half a billion tons of manure a year? Check out the report for the rest of the story.

 

 

 

 

 

 

So who pays the difference between market cost and true cost? We all do. As taxpayers, we subsidize the meat, dairy, and egg industries, which are among the worst polluters. As citizens, we breathe the foul air and pay to clean up the mess.  And this doesn’t even include the medical bills caused by industrial agribusiness.

What we can do: Keep growing the organic marketplace by buying organic whenever you can. Do it for yourself and the planet. Besides, as the organic sector grows, prices are expected to come down due to the classic factor “economy of scale.” Vote for those who support environmental laws and regulations. Especially support Proposition 37 this November!


Labels and lawsuits – knowing what’s in your food

In Food Politics, Take Action,
  • Posted on August 19, 2012
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Good news: Lots of people are interested in helping us know which products and services are sustainably produced. They study supply chains, ingredients, and processes, and certify, or give a green label to, products that meet their standards.

Bad news: There are literally hundreds of such certifying organizations! This is actually good news, but the overflow of players makes it difficult to know which labels are the most meaningful, since there are phony or misleading labels. As I explained in The Green Foodprint, “greenwashing” is the practice of pretending to be greener than you are. For instance, “free range” supposedly means that the cow or chicken is able to go outdoors. “Outdoors” might be a concrete feedlot or a small space accessible to only a few of the thousands of birds confined inside a gigantic warehouse.

Good news: The US has a single nationwide label for organic food – USDA Organic. Bad news: USDA is corrupted by politics, and the USDA organic label is constantly facing threats to its integrity from agribusiness megacorporations.

Good news: Destructive corporations recognize that PEOPLE WANT SUSTAINABLE PRODUCTS – but the corporations then cheat and cut corners to fool us into buying products that are not really sustainable. There are lots of ways they do this – bribing and threatening politicians and regulators, setting up phony consumer groups that parrot their spin, and inventing phony certifiers. Your solution: Earthwatch.org has a wonderful web page that evaluates some of the labels you’re most likely to see.

Briefly, the ones Earthwatch praises include USDA organic (despite its flaws), Country of Origin Labeling, Dolphin-Safe, Fair Trade Certified, Food Alliance Certified, and Marine Stewardship Council.

Good news: Attorneys who won big cases against the tobacco industry are now tackling Big Food. See the New York Times article here. Let’s hope they help clean up our big-food industry. In the meantime, you can help by voting for California’s proposition 37 this November, which would require GMO (genetically modified organisms) to be labeled.


Tomatoes as nature intended them

In Food Politics, Food to Try, Recommended Reads, Take Action, Useful tools,
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  • Posted on June 15, 2012
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Tomato lovers rave about the lively, distinct taste of genuine fresh tomatoes, which they say is infinitely superior to the hard round red billiard balls you can get at the supermarket any time of year. I can’t vouch for this, not being a raw tomato fan, but there isn’t much debate that conventional tomatoes are hard and tasteless. Here’s what author Barry Estabook said in his 2011 book Tomatoland:

“Perhaps our taste buds are trying to send us a message. Today’s industrial tomatoes are as bereft of nutrition as they are of flavor. According to analyses conducted by the U.S. Department of Agricul­ture, 100 grams of fresh tomato today has 30 percent less Vitamin C, 30 percent less thiamin, 19 percent less niacin, and 62 percent less calcium than it did in the 1960s. But the modern tomato does shame its 1960s counterpart in one area: It contains fourteen times as much sodium.”

Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, we’re blessed to be near the Central Valley, one of the world’s great breadbaskets. We also have lots of small farms and urban farmers, so those juicy red tomatoes are not too hard to find here. Farmers’ markets can be found in Berkeley, San Francisco, Walnut Creek, Moraga, San Rafael – go here to find one near you. The newest one opened this week in Lafayette.

You can always GROW tomatoes, as they are very forgiving and brown-thumb-friendly. Even a single potted plant can, with minimal human intervention, provide those tasty red tomatoes that are so prized.


Mega-soda ban in New York

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  • Posted on June 1, 2012
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You probably heard that on Wednesday, New York City announced that it would enact a ban on the sale of huge sodas (and some other sugar-heavy drinks) at some public places, namely movie theatres, restaurants, and street vending carts. The Center for Science in the Public Interest applauded the move.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The outcry has been deafening. You can read some of the “comments” appended to the New York Times story here. And as you can imagine, the sugary drinks industry is complaining.

Until recently, I personally have guzzled hundreds of gallons of caffeine-laden colas, some with sugar and some with equally perilous artificial sweeteners, so I think I can offer a somewhat balanced view. Let’s look at three facts:

  •  The obesity epidemic is dangerous to the health of individuals and to the future of our nation’s health care system. (we spend $14 billion a YEAR on obesity-related diseases such as diabetes).
  • Sugary drinks have empty calories.
  • People often don’t do what’s in their own best interest.

It’s the last one that starts the heated discussions. On a radio talk show Wednesday, I heard nutrition expert Liz Applegate criticize the move, saying that it’s a question of personal responsibility. Well, she has an impressive resume, but the “personal responsibility” line is exactly what all the makers of dangerous things (cigarettes, guns, pink slime burgers) say when threatened by attempts to curb their freedom to sell their products.

Two years ago, San Francisco banned the sale of sugary sodas in vending machines on city property. Somehow, the sky did not fall.

As a psychologist specializing in eating disorders for 25 years, I saw first-hand how people struggle to make good on their intentions to be healthy. And that doesn’t even count the people who aren’t even trying to eat healthily. As an academic who has published journal articles on obesity and read the research, I’m alarmed by the danger to our country.

What do you think? Obesity costs YOU in the form of your health insurance premiums, even if you aren’t overweight or obese. Should this ban proceed?


Meat glue — smart or yucky?

In Food, Food Politics, Food to Avoid, In the News, Toxins and Pesticides, Uncategorized,
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  • Posted on May 16, 2012
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Not since kindergarten, when some of us ate the library paste, has a more yucky food ingredient been brought to our attention, with the obvious exception of pink slime. (You’ll recall that pink slime is made of the sweepings from the slaughterhouse floor, washed in ammonia, and mixed with ground meat). This newly revealed substance is called “meat glue” and has been around for a while. A powder made of transglutaminase (an enzyme) and beef fibrin can be used to stick together odd bits of meat to form them into apparently whole prime cuts.

It may surprise you to learn that I don’t totally condemn this practice – in concept, anyway. Waste is a terrible thing to do to food, and anything that can reduce food waste is worth considering. On the other hand, meat itself is a huge waste (of grain, water, land, etc.), not to mention the cruelty involved, and if the concept of meat glue turns you off eating meat, that is a good thing!

Of course, when meat glue is used deceptively, to falsely upgrade less desirable parts of the carcass, that is dishonest and should be stopped. There’s another problem: bacteria from the surface of different pieces of animal flesh are now in the middle of the final product and less likely to be killed during cooking, possibly causing food poisoning.

What do you think?


GMO is getting even more dangerous

In Food Politics, Food to Avoid, GMO's, In the News,
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  • Posted on May 2, 2012
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Yesterday, the San Francisco Chronicle’s excellent reporter Carolyn Lochhead published an article on genetically engineered food crops  (GE, also called GMO for genetically modified organism).  She pointed out that GMOs have been linked to human diseases and environmental damage, including catastrophic losses of monarch butterflies. It’s gotten so bad, she writes, that even the food manufacturers are worried that the latest “improvements” to corn planted for biofuel might ruin their own GMO crops!

Did you know that Dow wants to start selling a corn variety bred to be resistant to a pesticide that contains an Agent Orange chemical? In case you’re too young to remember the Viet Nam War, Agent Orange was sprayed widely over that country to kill its rainforests, to make its soldiers easier to target. Besides inflicting unthinkable environmental damage, Agent Orange harmed many Vietnamese and Americans.

The chemical (2,4-D) has been implicated in cancer, Parkinson’s disease, liver disease, reduced sperm counts, endocrine (hormone) disruption, and damage to nerves and the immune system. Its makers hope growers will buy tons of it and spray it on their crops to keep bugs away.  I don’t want it used to produce my food. Do you? Personally, I’d rather eat a bug.

Besides, bugs evolve (whether creationists like it or not) and have become resistant to pesticides, so more and stronger pesticides are applied, creating the well-known “pesticide treadmill” that farmers can’t escape once they’re on it. One expert quoted by Lochhead calls it “a chemical arms race.” Fortunately, lots of people are not fooled – over 140 groups and over 360,000 citizens stated their opposition  to 2,4-D during the public comments period during the approval process.

And in more hopeful news, in California we will soon have a ballot measure that requires food makers to label their products that include genetically modified organisms. So get ready for November and cast your vote FOR freedom of information

A t-shirt I saw at a recent Earth Day event said it all:  GMO?  OMG!


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